‘We won’t Pay for Resits’, Egerton University Students Maintain

A new day of the 29/09/2017 had been welcomed quite differently in Egerton University. Early in the morning, quite a few students could be seen standing at the student centre, the school CBD but as the day progressed, the crowd grew larger and larger and it just turned into a demonstration.

A new regime has been introduced in the institution, unlike the past, students are now required to sit for a resit exam if they failed in any unit.

In the past, the university required a student to retake the failed unit when next offered. If the student chose to finish his/her four years first then do the retaking thereafter, they would pay a fee of Ksh.18000, but if they chose to retake the unit while still on course, it would be free. The fee led to the students, led by their student leaders advocating for a change of the regime, and it bore fruits when retaking was scrubbed off and re-sitting was introduced.

The new form, however, was faced with adverse rejection from the student body due to the unexpected conditions that followed. A conspicuously large portion of the student body seemed to be utterly agitated to the abnormally high fee for the re-sits. For every failed unit, a student is required to pay Ksh.1000 per credit factor. Averagely, most of the units offered by the institution have three credit factors, requiring a fee of Ksh.6000. Some had postponed redoing their failed units for the former curriculum allowed the same and are now faced with six units to re-sit, each with an average C. F of three, do the fee math.

This led to a series of two failed demonstrations until this day that the students joined hands to fight the latter. The marching began at around 10 AM, heading to the school administration and later took course to the lecture halls, where everyone who has attended any lecture was flushed out to join the comrades. Anti resit and anti classes could be heard loud and wide, with students threatening to boycott classes till the fee had been scrubbed off.

They, however, choose to be nonviolent choosing not to destroy property. The administration is still silent, and the students noise it still on.